Podcast Receiver Software

One of the greatest parts of my job is meeting and working with community leaders from all over South Central District (TX, OK, LA and AR). I’ve met a bunch of really cool, and interesting people so far, but most of them only via phone. Now that I’m relocated to Dallas (well, mostly – we’re in temp housing until our old house sells and we can get a new one) it’s a lot easier for me to connect with people in the DFW area, as well as travel to other sites more conveniently (either by car, or DFW and Love Airports are both close by).

Traveling to some areas of Dallas, I’ve found, is a lot like driving cross country. It seems to take way longer than it should, and I always seem to hit all the bad traffic times 🙂 Luckily, I have an “AUX” port in my Civic, so I can plug my Zune into there and listen to my music, audio books, or podcasts during all those hours stuck in traffic. I have to admit that I’m disappointed that the Zune software doesn’t come with an integrated podcast receiver the way some other products do, but I’m hopeful this feature will be added in the future. For now, I’ve settled on HappyFish to do my subscriptions and downloads for me.

HappyFish actually installed (which gives it a +1 from me) on my Windows Vista Enterprise 64-bit laptop, where several others either didn’t install, or didn’t work quite right. Their UI is pretty easy to use, and it has two main feature that I wanted in a podcast receiver but hadn’t seen yet – the ability to programmatically set the filename of the podcast to something I want it to be, and (more importantly) the ability to automatically set the Genre ID3 tag to “Podcast” when I download it. Now, all my podcasts conveniently show up in my Zune as “Podcast” and not “Unknown” or some other random values. Additionally, HappyFish was written in .NET 2.0, so they definitely get a +1 for that…

I’ve only had it installed for a short time, and my bandwidth at this apartment is horrendous, but – so far so good.